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Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Short Story--An Elegant Apocalypse

Sunrise on Planet X-4732B is one of the most stunning and
beautiful events in the Universe.This
is a well-established fact, determined by a complex algorithm developed by the
Ultra-Computer housed on the 4th Moon of Planet G-7512, known to
locals as Home.The lunar location was
originally meant to isolate it and prevent the most powerful computer in the
universe from running amok.

Naturally, by the time the Ultra-Computer was completed,
there were six more computers being built on six asteroids, each one an order
of magnitude more powerful than the Ultra.That is not germane to the issue, but does explain why the Ultra was
free to spend its time determining the nature and location of the most
stunningly beautiful sights in the universe.

So the morning of the last day of the world began with the
last most beautiful sunrise.If
anything, the approach of the disaster gave the sunrise a more vivid
coloration.It was not, however,
beautiful in the eyes of the beholder.There were no beholders, for the same reason that X-4732B has no local
name: there are no higher order inhabitants on X-4732B.Lower-order organisms abound, or did before
the world ended, but they had failed to evolve to create pollution, disrupt the
perfect order of the landscape, or anticipate the apocalypse.

The absence of human or human-like observers is, of
course, central to the elegance of the X-4732B apocalypse (for every apocalypse
is local, until the final event, the end of the universe so eloquently
documented by Douglas Adams).Besides a
failure to muck up the view, lower-order organisms tend to lack the necessary
glands to panic.Had the planet evolved
so much as a muskrat, the day would have taken a different turn, and the Ultra
Computer would have had to recalculate the event’s standing in its ranking of
events approaching perfection.

Naturally, just when it seemed safe to assume that the
apocalypse would proceed with dignity and quiet splendor, everything changed.A lone, tiny, and definitely lost space capsule
spiraled down through the oddly Earth-like atmosphere.

In the best of all possible worlds, the man who emerged,
dazed, from the erring and now disabled spacecraft would have been Arthur Dent.

It wasn’t.

His name was Johnson Bob, and he’d been in transit between
two planets far from X-4732B when his flight path took him a hair too close to
a concert by the intergalactic band Disaster Area.The cosmic disruption of the loudest band in
the universe had put an end to his tedious business trip and landed Johnson on
X-4732B in time to witness the end of that world, and potentially to disrupt
its tranquil order.

The event was saved from the contamination of panic,
despite the intrusion of a more-or-less higher life form, by the simple fact
that Johnson Bob never left his ship.He was
sleeping off the disconcerting effects of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster he’d
had in the space port bar before leaving, a task that requires the full
concentration of all bodily forces for a full day. In fact, in an act of incredible bravado, or idiocy, he had consumed two of the Gargle Blasters, and would be fortunate to wake up at all.

Johnson Bob therefore slept through the end of the
world.He failed to observe as the sky
turned from its usual chartreuse to an odd shade of puce and finally a perfect
shade of red-orange.Nor was he aware
when the atmosphere boiled away, as his ship maintained the ideal balance of
gasses for the continuation of human life.

Johnson Bob likewise missed the exquisite moment when all
factors coalesced into the perfect, nearly silent yet symphonic finality.It was this perfect coordination of elements
that led the Ultra Computer to designate the X-4732B Apocalypse as the most
elegant apocalypse of all time.

Millennia of constipated volcanism beneath the immense
chain of volcanoes that ringed the planet burst through the plug in every peak simultaneously,
exactly at the instant the asteroid that had boiled away the atmosphere struck
precisely at the southern pole, and the sun went nova at the same moment.

Johnson Bob should have been boiled away with the
atmosphere, of course, but the Ultra Computer considered the final touch that
perfected the X-4732B Apocalypse to be the manner in which the volcanic
cataclysm ejected the one bit of alien matter from the planet in time to make
it a purely local event. When Johnson Bob eventually awoke, he had a nasty
hangover but no awareness of where he’d been or what he’d done.The blast had flung him back onto his orignal
trajectory, and he landed without incident and went to the nearest bar for
another Gargle-Blaster, in hopes of clearing his head.

To a human observer, the tiny space capsule as it exited
would have looked like a watermelon pip spat contemptuously at the remainder of
the universe as the planet exploded into a nearly infinite number of identical
fragments.

But of course since Johnson Bob was unconscious the whole
time, there was no human, or even sentient, observer.That, the computer decided as the final rays
of the perfectly symmetrical pattern of dissolution faded into empty space, was
perhaps the most elegant feature.Perfection could only unfold unobserved.